Jim Jordan demands FBI Round River docs after memos reveal targeting of Trump officials, allies

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Wednesday demanded the FBI turn over all evidence related to a counterintelligence operation during the 2020 election codenamed "Round River" that classified President Donald Trump’s own administration officials and political allies as “conduits” of Russian disinformation. 

The letter from Jordan to FBI Director Kash Patel was prompted by the first substantive revelations about the Round River operation contained in declassified documents made public last month by the White House Government Transparency Task Force. 

“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) operation, codenamed Round River, during the 2020 presidential election. Recently released information reveals that the operation categorized prominent Republicans and conservative organizations as 'conduits' of Russian disinformation, while certain Democrats such as President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, were 'targets' of such disinformation,” Jordan wrote. 

“In response to this information, you issued a statement suggesting that Round River was used as political lawfare to suppress evidence tying the Biden family to corruptive business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, rather than offering a complete picture of potential foreign threats,” he continued. "We appreciate your continued transparency, and we write to request additional information regarding Round River.” 

Among the evidence that Jordan requested were the confidential human source files for 14 informants who Patel revealed last month were providing derogatory information to the U.S. government about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election.

You can read Jordan’s letter below:

The declassified documents released last month show the FBI and U.S. spy agencies received the derogatory evidence about Biden from the informants but that a group of FBI analysts embarked on a secret operation to tamp down a Ukrainian corruption scandal engulfing his family during the 2020 election by formally designating Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, key members of Congress and journalists as Russian disinformation “conduits.”

In response to the task force, Director Patel said that the FBI has “identified tens of thousands of responsive pages” of documents related to the Round River probe and that the bureau is currently preparing them for disclosure to the task force and Congress, Patel wrote in a letter.

Now, Jordan is seeking those Round River documents, including  all “documents and communications” related to the counterintelligence probe, the reporting from the 53 Confidential Human Sources (CHS) in the probe, and specifically how the FBI handed the 14 CHSs who reported “derogatory information on President Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings with Ukraine.”  

Round River was one of four named counterintelligence probes or operations that targeted Trump and his supporters over the last decade which subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat during his political career, Just the News reported earlier this year.

One element of Round River was centered in the Pittsburgh Field Office and initially targeted Trump lawyer and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s and Joe Biden’s exploits in Ukraine, but it then expanded to look at numerous public figures who spoke out about Biden family corruption concerns.  

Early whistleblower evidence from that case has raised grave concerns inside Congress about potential civil liberty violations, specifically that people in that investigation may have been targeted solely by virtue of their speech. Lawmakers fear the standards for who was targeted were simply talking points deemed by FBI counterintelligence to be "Russian disinformation."

In other words, reporters, lawmakers, movie makers and lawyers who made certain allegations or raised questions about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine may have been assessed to be national security threats aligned with Russia worthy of investigation and treated as purveyors of disinformation interfering in elections, sources told Just the News in March. 

The recent disclosures from the White House Transparency Task Force showed just how far the FBI’s effort went. One of the documents, a spreadsheet that was recovered from U.S. intelligence agency files, shows that spy agencies and the FBI created a list of more than six dozen prominent organizations, Americans or foreigners who became figures in the Biden family Ukraine scandal and the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. 

The spreadsheet neatly divided figures along political lines, with Democrats like the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and George Soros listed as victimized “targets” of Russian disinformation and conservatives like Fox News, One America News, filmmaker Michael Caputo and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “conduits” for disinformation.

The FBI also labeled two of President Donald Trump’s first-term Cabinet secretaries, Pompeo and Barr, as well as Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson and Lindsey Graham and House GOP committee chairmen Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan as “conduits” even while they all investigated whether the allegations of corruption against the Biden family were true.  

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), based in FBI headquarters, concurred with each of the assessments in the spreadsheet with a “no objection” designation, the documents state.

Remarkably, the effort to portray the Biden scandal as Russian disinformation came even though confidential human sources working for the FBI and other agencies began reporting a steady stream of concerns starting in 2015 that Ukraine was possibly targeting the future first family for influence, the memos show. The FBI has identified at least 14 informants who were providing derogatory information on the Bidens, Patel said in his letter to the task force. Patel also said that he terminated the FBI’s FITF.

Editor's Note: John Solomon is on leave as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while working as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force as an unpaid special government employee.